From David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea:
” ‘You must have a place … to which you can go, in your own heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what you owe anyone or what anyone owes you. You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are.’ Hearing this, our first reaction is to believe we are being pushed toward a form of self-absorption, but [Joseph] Campbell’s point is that most of us carry responsibility in a very selfish way, as a burden, a weight, something that diminishes us and makes us resentful of those for whom we are responsible. Campbell asks us to look for the part of us that is not beholden, that stands outside our normal structures, particularly the structures of work that can lie on us so heavily, that take so much energy to carry, and that can break the blossoming fragility of anything new and promising.
To find the roots of our responsibilities, we must go to the roots of our abilities, a journey into a core sense of ourselves where we can put together an understanding of how we are made, why we have the responsibilities we have, and, just as important, the images that formed us in our growing.” p. 157
If there were ever words that articulate for me what I help others to do, it is this. Thank you David for writing such a stunning and poetic book about work.
